


Idyll

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Afternoon delight, Angst and Tragedy, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-21 01:47:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1533176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An afternoon's peace seems to last forever. Alistair and Mahariel spend some time alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Idyll

"So," says Mahariel, as their group quits the inn to explore Denerim for the day. "Our room is empty."

"It is, yes..." It takes him a moment to catch on. "You want to-?"

She grabs a handful of his tunic and drags him upstairs. Within minutes Alistair has forgotten all about darkspawn and Ostagar and the Blight as she tumbles him naked into bed and writhes against him in the winding sheets. He gasps alongside her, kissing her open mouth when he's able, his body raw and aching as she rides up and down on him in a way that makes him think he will die. The whole inn hears them, and he doesn't care. The whole city block hears them, and he doesn't care.

A Grey Warden doesn't get to choose much in life, but Alistair likes to think this is a choice he made for himself--without Duncan, without Loghain's shadow at his back, without the words of the Joining echoing in his mind. For a few moments, there is her.

Only her.

Because her tongue is on his tongue, her cunt tight on his shaft. He pumps himself to completion and spills his seed inside her, then collapses into damp sheets, into sleep. Her hair spiderwebs around him, and he doesn't mind getting caught.

His dreams are troubled. They always are. Duncan shakes his head beside the campfire and tells him to turn back. _You know what she is._ Alistair pushes through that mist and when he wakes all he feels is the heat of Mahariel's body, her thigh against the inside of his leg.

"Did you sleep?" she murmurs.

"Not as well I would have liked." Funny, how sarcasm seems to abandon him in bed. "Dreams?"

"Not as terrible as I would have liked," she says, and tweaks his nipple.

It has become a sort of grim routine to ask what the other has dreamed. In the field it is necessary to assure the spawn have not gained an advantage. Here, with dust motes spiraling through a cheesecloth curtain in a sweltering inn attic, it is comfort. Alistair remembers what it was like his first weeks of waking to every bone in his body screaming with the Archdemon's cry. He was fortunate enough then to have Duncan then. Mahariel...has him.

It's a pauper's gift, one he offered at first out of grudging loyalty to a fellow Warden, now because he wants to. And because she wants him.

_Perhaps that is enough._

"There was something, though...."

Her words are halting, and he knows this is a secret she would not have shared with him a few weeks ago.

"...a stream. A black stream with trees on the far side." She swallows. "I used to dream about it all the time as a little girl. Last night I knelt beside the water for the first time and saw my face beside...."

"Your mother and father?" he guesses.

"I never met them."

A fly taps the windowpane. Alistair doesn't know what to say to that, so he says, "Were there fish in the stream?"

She lets out a sigh.

"What? I'm _hungry._ " Alistair plays with the split ends of her hair. "Were they trout or....alright, I don't know any other fish," and as always feels a jolt of relief when she smiles.

"Doesn't matter. It's just dreaming." Though he suspects that's not at all what she wants to say. She's a wicked, sad thing, his Warden, a wildcat wandered so long and lonely in the woods it never knew it was alone. "Didn't your Duncan teach you anything about skinning and gutting?" she asks after awhile.

"I, um, cooked a rabbit on a spit, once.

"With the fur still on?"

"Either you're a mind reader or incredibly _smug._ "

"Maybe I just know my game," she says, and lathes her tongue under his collarbone.

He shudders. The sensation runs hot and tight through his body before uncoiling in his groin. The vapors of dream likewise uncurl into memory, to a night beside the campfire when Alistair tempted a wounded lynx with a strip of salt beef. 

_"Careful,"_ Duncan warned, though from the resignation in his voice he must have known Alistair would not listen....or that his heart was soft and stupid enough to try. The three scars throb on the back of his hand as Mahariel continues to whisper about her memories of the Dalish Woods and her loneliness among silent trees. A stolen mother and father, wolf songs, the scent of spider lilies in spring. There is so much he doesn't understand about her, but she lets him drag his fingers through her hair, and strum his knuckles down her ribs. 

"They'll be back soon," she says, as the light from the dirty window stretches up the wall. 

"Maybe this time they'll learn to knock." His body is too sore and sated to move. "I'm not sure Wynne can spare any more grey hairs."

She chuckles. It's a rare sound from his elf wench, but she lets him feel it against his skin, and that's enough to make this attic with its rag-stuffed windows and itching beds all that matters in the world. It wasn't two months ago that she pushed him in the dirt after Ostagar for suggesting, for even _thinking_ she'd ever follow him or his shem Grey Warden cult, and yet here she is, not an hour before above him and around him, and he inside her. 

_But I dreamed I made a mistake._

She straddles him suddenly. A quick lick, and her callused hand strokes him back to life as she spreads her warm thighs. They both gasp and flutter their eyes shut as she sinks down his length, sheathing him in silken walls. "Oh, Maker...."

He isn't sure which one of them says it. They've rubbed off on each other so much.

The thought's all Alistair needs to grab her hips brutally. They're all that's left. Ferelden is falling down around them, and they only have each other.

"Please." Her nails claw down his chest, desperate to cling to _now_ before the darkness swallows them again. For a moment Alistair recalls a lynx's flashing eyes at the edge of firelight, needy even as it raked the flesh from his hand. _"Please."_

"I-" He gasps into her red hair. That's as far as he gets. Her teeth are at his chin, his throat, his ears, and he cries out to the ceiling. He longs to answer _yes love yes I'm yours I'm here, I'm always here, nothing could drive me away _but the words evaporate. There is a brief panic in his heart, as if he has missed the thing that would save him, but then that too is gone.__

There is only her.

 _I had these dreams,_ he tells her at the Landsmeet, when she betrays him. _I had these dreams where I tried to be happy._

But he's not, because he's Alistair in a cold bed in Denerim, in Starkhaven, in Kirkwall. He learns of her sacrifice when he's half sunk in his cups, and tries not to feel a thing.

"I had...." He buries his head in his arms at the Hanged Man, because no one else is listening. _I had these dreams of us._

"I'm so sorry, Duncan," he murmurs. _I'm so sorry, Mahariel. I wish...._

It doesn't matter what he wishes. Because a Grey Warden doesn't get to choose.


End file.
